COLUMBIA, S.C. — The headquarters of the South Carolina Democratic Party is housed in a squat one-story building on the outskirts of downtown Columbia, in a sleepy residential neighborhood near the governor’s mansion. The brick building’s modest proportions reflect the state party’s historically humble fortunes: Until recently, a Democrat had not been elected to statewide office in South Carolina in nearly two decades. The last Democratic presidential nominee to win the state was Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Last week, though, the party headquarters became the center of a stunning Democratic upset when Annie Andrews prevailed over Darline Graham in the state’s U.S. Senate election. Andrews’s victory broke Republicans’ decades-long hold on the seat and helped propel Democrats to an unlikely majority in the Senate. Meanwhile, at the headquarters of the state Democratic Party, the surprise success prompted a once-unthinkable question: Ahead of the state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary in 2028, can South Carolina Democrats turn their state from red to purple?
Signs of post-midterms merriment were evident Thursday afternoon at the headquarters, where piles of yard signs and half-eaten containers of takeout littered the labyrinth of low-ceilinged rooms. In an office off the main staff bullpen, state party chair Christale Spain was watching MSNBC on a wall-mounted television and trying to wrap her head around the shock of Andrews’s victory. “It’s like, ‘Damn, we did this,’” said Spain, who took the stage with Andrews on Tuesday night at her victory party in Charleston. “We shocked the damn world.”
Spain, a native of the Columbia area, was sporting a royal blue Zeta Phi Beta sorority jacket and thick-framed tortoiseshell glasses. A list of Democratic candidates, scrawled in dry-erase marker on a wall-size whiteboard, loomed over her desk. Spain has led the state party since 2023, when she won the chair with the support of former state chair and then-Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison.
Her first full-time job for the state party came in 2012, as a front desk worker at party HQ; a decade later, after stints working for such Democrats as Sen. Cory Booker (New Jersey) and Rep. James E. Clyburn (South Carolina), as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), she returned to the state party as chair. Before entering politics, she had served as a placement specialist in the foster care system, a background that she says has come in surprisingly handy in her dealings with politicians. “It’s a mental health field,” she said with a wry smile.
As national Democrats sift through the spoils of last Tuesday’s romp, Andrews’s success in South Carolina has been marked down as something of a happy accident. The pediatrician and self-described “radically centrist” mother of three benefited both from a strong national environment for Democrats and the unique weaknesses of Graham, a political neophyte whose selection by President Donald Trump to run to fill the seat left vacant after the death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R), sparked a bitter feud within the state GOP. “You’ve got a huge bench of Republicans ready to be the next senator, and you’re just going to stick Lindsey Graham’s sister in there?” Spain recalled. “It was great for us.” On Election Day, Darline Graham ran nearly five points behind the victorious Republican gubernatorial candidate, suggesting that Republican distaste for Graham — rather than a surge of enthusiasm for Democrats — may have cost the GOP the Senate election.
Still, Spain and her colleagues at the state party are hopeful that Andrews’s victory and the 2028 Democratic primary give the party a chance to push the historically conservative state further into battleground territory. “I don’t think you can call what happened on Tuesday a fluke,” said Jay Parmley, the state party’s executive director. “There will be a time in the future when people will look and say that South Carolina is a very different place politically before the election of Annie Andrews and after the election of Annie Andrews.”
‘I hope it wakes people up’
Spain keeps an action figure of Stacey Abrams on her coffee table, and she subscribes to the Georgia Democrat’s strategy of long-term grassroots organizing. When she took over as chair in 2023, the state party was still recovering from Harrison’s loss in his 2020 Senate bid, a race that generated considerable national attention and money but disappointing results. The upside of Harrison’s race was that he had secured more than 1.1 million votes, the most ever for a Democratic Senate candidate in South Carolina. Spain realized that, in a state where Republicans rarely cracked a million votes in midterm elections, Democrats could be competitive in non-presidential election years if they consistently turned out their base. With Harrison’s help, she launched a year-round voter-engagement initiative and grew the party’s paid canvassing program to keep those voters headed to the polls.
Ahead of the midterms, Spain made sure there was a Democrat running in every statehouse race — the first time in recent history that the state party had met that mark. Even if a candidate in a deep-red area didn’t win, Spain reasoned, a competitive race would help tie up Republicans in a way that would benefit Democrats in more competitive parts of the state. “They were all trying to save themselves,” she said.
The Democratic National Committee’s decision to award South Carolina the coveted first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential primary in 2028, formalized in August, helped, too. That selection opened a spigot of national dollars that have since flowed into the state’s Democratic ecosystem, freeing up the state party to spend more of its own funds on local organizing efforts. It attracted big-name presidential hopefuls, whom Spain has shepherded to rural areas to boost outreach efforts. “We took all the big counties off the map,” Spain said. “We’re not going to Charleston. We’re not going to Greenville. We’re going to the most rural and reddest places we can.”
Coupled with Andrews’s own statewide canvassing, Parmley said, those efforts began to pay off Tuesday. In addition to winning the Senate race, Democrats flipped a U.S. House seat and won 10 Republican-held seats in the statehouse, breaking the GOP’s’ two-thirds supermajority. “After Tuesday, we look purple,” Parmley said, adding: “Probably closer to a light shade of purple than a dark shade of purple.” But purple nonetheless.
Already, a cavalcade of Democratic presidential hopefuls — California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Sen. Mark Kelly (Arizona), former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and more — have begun barnstorming across the state ahead of the January 2028 primary, bringing television cameras and national donor dollars with them.
On Friday evening, members of the Sumter County NAACP got a preview of that national attention. As the sun set, a group of predominantly older Black South Carolinians, dressed in tuxedos and shimmering dresses, filtered into the gymnasium at the local civic center for the organization’s annual banquet. Inside, Booker, the perennial presidential contender, floated between banquet tables, shaking hands and doling out hugs. After a dinner of chicken and green beans, and a speech situating the latest Democratic victory in the long history of the struggle for civil rights in the South, Booker returned to the floor. A scrum of eager audience members had assembled for selfies. “It’s always like this,” Booker’s flack said as he followed his grinning boss around the room.
In between handshakes, Booker took a moment to urge the DNC to spend more to help South Carolina Democrats build off the momentum of Andrews’s win. “I hope it wakes a lot of people up,” he said. “I’ve been saying for a very long time that our party needs to be investing in the South.”
A still-troubled brand
As presidential aspirants crisscross the state, the party is hoping the national money and media attention will make it easier to mobilize low-propensity Democratic voters. “Now that the eyes of Mordor are firmly turned towards South Carolina, it’s going to give us a [new] level of resources and attention,” said Harrison, who is helping coordinate the state party’s 2028 efforts. “Everybody’s going to want to be in South Carolina, and the party has to monetize that.”
At the same time, the party understands the perils of forcing local Democrats to affiliate themselves too closely with the national party brand, which remains toxic throughout much of the state. In the lead-up to the midterms, Andrews publicly distanced herself from Democrats in Washington, accusing them of failing to secure the border and expressing limited support for some of the Trump administration’s tax policies. Spain said she didn’t entirely agree with Andrews’s move to distance herself from the party brand but understood why she had to do it. “You don’t have to take the banner with you everywhere you go,” Spain said.
As a model for South Carolina to follow in the coming years, Spain pointed to two neighbors, Georgia and North Carolina — states that, with steady investment from the DNC, have turned from red to a deeper shade of purple. “We did what we did with limited national investment,” Spain said. “If you want [to replicate] what Georgia did, we can do that here.”
In South Carolina’s case, Parmley said, that shift is neither inevitable nor straightforward. But, at the very least, it now seems possible. “There are going to be bumps,” he said. “But I’d much rather be us than them right now. And, usually, we don’t feel that way.”
The post ‘A light shade of purple’: South Carolina Democrats bet an upset is just the start appeared first on Washington Post.
